70 YEARS AGO TODAY ....

.... a US bomber dropped the first atomic bomb weapon on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Over 70,000 people died in the hours immediately following the blast. Later, radiation sickness, cancer and other long-term effects pushed the estimated death toll above 200,000. Though they were the enemy, RIP all those that died, sympathy for those who survived and for the ones who still today suffer from this terrible act. Lamplighter

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/06/hiroshima-remembers-atomic-bomb-abolish-the-evil-of-nuclear-weapons

Thanks, Lamplighter. It was indeed a terrible thing. Did they actually realise what they were doing?

Did anyone watch The Manhattan Project? It seemed entirely soulless to me, with no thought for the damage it might do.

Sabot wrote:Thanks, Lamplighter.  It was indeed a terrible thing.  Did they actually realise what they were doing?

Did anyone watch The Manhattan Project?  It seemed entirely soulless to me, with no thought for the damage it might do.

They must have known, but maybe not the scale of the follow up; the cancers, the abnormalituies in newborn children, the slow, painful lingering death of those who survived. They wanted to test the bomb, where better to do so on an enemy state, far away from Europe, where there were many US soldiers etc? The Japanese in the USA, who had been born there well before the war and were American citizens, whose families had lived there for generations, were interned as enemy aliens in concentration camps far out in the desert, their rights taken away from them. If you can do that to your fellow citizens, not illegals, but bona fide members of the country, why worry about a load of slit-eyed, yellow devils living on the other side of the world? Why didn't they drop the bomb on Berlin? Ah, but those pesky Huns, although the enemy, were Caucasian, ie white. The double standards applied to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and not on Berlin are there for all to see. LL

Yep. They wanted to test it on live guinea pigs to see what would happen, and as far away as possible, on a race that wasn't white, in their book. A race that so very few people really understand.

I hope most of them went to their graves in shame, and from what I have gathered a lot of them did.

You know, as a young child, what with The Holocaust and The Nuclear Bomb, I didn't half witness some horror stories.

Sorry, my sympathies are for all those men that died in Japanese prison camps, the millions of Chinese that were slaughtered and raped when Japan attacked China - the Japanese were bloody barbarians, FFS.

No tears for all those Chinese that were used in grotesque medical experiments? Or the mass slaughter of Chinese people?

Some nice pictures here, if you aren't too sensitive to look at them:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=japanese+atrocities+in+china&rlz=1CASMAE_enGB547GB547&espv=2&biw=1366&bih=657&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CDUQsARqFQoTCO75tsuclMcCFeWW2wodU8oHAw

Or maybe words are better?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes

To determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water until frozen solid. The arm was later amputated; the doctor would repeat the process on the victim's upper arm to the shoulder. After both arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the legs until only a head and torso remained. The victim was then used for plague and pathogens experiments.[71]

I am very glad hundreds of thousands - maybe even millions - of American lives were saved by the dropping of the bombs. At least it meant no more prisoners of war would be eaten by Japanese troops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes

"... the Japanese started selecting prisoners and every day one prisoner was taken out and killed and eaten by the soldiers. I personally saw this happen and about 100 prisoners were eaten at this place by the Japanese. The remainder of us were taken to another spot 50 miles [80 km] away where 10 prisoners died of sickness. At this place, the Japanese again started selecting prisoners to eat. Those selected were taken to a hut where their flesh was cut from their bodies while they were alive and they were thrown into a ditch where they later died."[111]

Of course, credit for finally defeating these barbarians should also be given to the Red Army, for their textbook liberation of Manchuria.

Many people understand that 'race' perfectly, Sabot.

Does that mean that we have to behave like barbarians? And kill thousands of innocent people in the most appalling fashion.

Oh, so, you would have preferred the medical experiments go on, then? You would have preferred to see hundreds of thousands of US troops die in a land invasion of Japan? Just so, seventy years later, you could make moralistic noises about us being 'barbarians'?

And frankly, you personally did NOT see any 'horrors'. Other people did see the death camps, and others did survive to tell of the countless atrocities committed by Japan. Their opinion is of rather more value in the great scheme of things.

Go and tell the handful of women still being treated like dirt by Japan how dreadful the west was to drop two atom bombs - the poor 'comfort women', abducted and used as sexual slaves by the Japanese army. Most of them died at Japanese hands, of course - they were regarded as 'sub human'.

Japan wasn't going to stop, Sabot - do you really not grasp that? Even after Hirohito had decided to surrender, some of the military tried to stage a coup to fight on.

War is Hell, end of. It is not a game played on the playing fields of Eton. The Japanese you're so concerned about killed over TEN MILLION in China alone, FFS.

There are somethings that it is not possible to debate with you, Bonny. So I shall leave it now.

Probably not, Sabot, as I do not suffer from the modern affliction known as pathological altruism.

http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-japan-bomb-20150805-story.html#page=1


New evidence of Japan's effort to build atom bomb at the end of WWII

End quote from longer piece:



Chieko Takeuchi, widow of the atomic scientist, recalled her husband saying, "If we'd built the bomb first, of course we would have used it. I'm glad, in some ways, that our facilities were destroyed."

I had an uncle who was  a POW in Japan.  They were treated appallingly and often in a barbaric fashion.

I have friends who are Japanese and are wonderful.  One of them witnessed the mushroom cloud up close  and she and others were fine and still are.  Furthermore, she has no animosity towards the US because she understood the reason.

ETA:  My daughters have a great uncle who was shot down flying his USAF plane.......many people lost loved ones from here too. 

I do not agree with those bombs but please have a thought for some words you are writing.......

Frankly, it's an extremely good job the Nazis dismissed so much of the science relating to the A bomb as 'Jewish science' or the first city to see a mushroom cloud would have been London.

Because they already had ICMBs - what else does anyone think V2s are?

President Truman had NO choice, unless he wanted the slaughter to continue. Because of the cult of Bushido Japan was going to fight to the last man, woman and child.

Bonny, I was going to write about the Germans and their technology and appreciate you doing that ahead of me.  

We know they had the technology - Operation Paperclip.  

Who likes war?

Oh, it's amazing how many followers of warlike cults just LOVE war when they're invading countries with peasant-based economies, as China was in the 1930's, and massacring millions of people.

They even like it when they appear to 'win' unprovoked attacks on bases run by industrialised, but isolationist, democracies.

Strangely, they tend to go off the whole notion of 'war' when the consequences of their own aggression finally rebound on their own home nations.

Heaven help us now then what with Israel, ISIS, Iran and the possible nuclear option........

lily wrote:Heaven help us now then what with Israel, ISIS, Iran and the possible nuclear option........

The thing that really scares me, Lily, is exactly that seventy years have now passed - Hiroshima and Nagasaki are slipping beyond human memory.

When I see people arguing that nuclear wars are now 'winnable' as long as your 'side' strikes first, I despair for humanity.

seventy years have now passed - Hiroshima and Nagasaki are slipping beyond human memory.

Yes, Bonny, that IS the problem.  There was the time when we were in the Cold War and that stopped each side in their tracks.........

I fear that it will be completely crazy people the next time......

this is certain: politicians talks about dismantling nuclear facilities, but this is bullshit, because we all know that this will not end, because someone makes profit about selling nuclear weapons.

Indeed, Pedro - as with all the arms trade.

bb1, I agree with you.

It is so sad but true.  I thought that what was interesting (if that word can be used here) is just how many weapons have been tested.  It did not surprise me that the US tested the most followed by Russia but I was surprised that France came in third.

https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally

Remember, it was France that blew up the Rainbow Warrior...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, codenamed Opération Satanique,[1] was an operation by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence services, the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE), carried out on 10 July 1985. During the operation, two operatives sank the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, the Rainbow Warrior in the port of Auckland, New Zealand on its way to a protest against a planned French nuclear test in Moruroa. Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship.

France initially denied responsibility, but two French agents were captured and charged with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder. As the truth came out, the scandal resulted in the resignation of the French Defence Minister Charles Hernu.

I forgot all about that, Bonny.  It was certainly shocking.

everything about nuclear weapons is shocking.

Could not agree more, Pedro.